Juneteenth Celebration Photo Album: June 19, 2024
Every year since 1997, the U.S. Senate and House introduced a resolution to make Juneteenth a national holiday. In June 2021, Congress finally passed the resolution to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. President Biden signed hte bill into law on June 17, 2021, making Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since 1983 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was created.
Reflect on Juneteenth with Remarks from the 2024 Celebration
Juneteenth’s Origins
Union General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865. Granger quickly announced General Order No. 3:
The people are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.
The freed are advised to remain in their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Emancipation did not happen overnight and some cases, enslavers did not tell Black people they were free until after the harvest season in the fall. Also, enslavers were not happy with the freedom Juneteenth created. It was not uncommon that when freed people tried to leave, many of them were beaten, lynched, or murdered.
Freedom Summer
Within 12 years segregation laws would begin that restricted housing, employment, and education opportunities as well as voting rights for Black people. Friday marks the 60th anniversary of the murders of Michael (Mickey) Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, MS.
Schwerner and Chaney worked for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Goodman was one of the hundreds of college students from across the country who volunteered to be a part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project known as Freedom Summer.
Freedom Summer was that for ten weeks, white students from the North would join activists in the Mississippi for a massive effort to force the national media and public to be aware and acknowledge the entrenched violence and massive injustice taking place in Mississippi.
The three men believed their work was necessary, but also dangerous: Ku Klux Klan membership in Mississippi in 1964 was more than 10,000. The Klan was prepared to use violence to fight the Civil Rights movement; on April 24, 1964, Klan showed its reach by staging 61 simultaneous cross burnings throughout the state.
Over the course of the summer of 1964, members of the Klan burned 20 black Mississippi churches. On June 16, Klan members targeted Neshoba County's Mt. Zion Baptist Church, where Schwerner had spent time working. Schwerner, however, was not there that day; he had gone to Oxford, Ohio, to train a group of Freedom Summer volunteers. Upon returning to Mississippi on June 21st, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney visited the charred remains of Mt. Zion. On the drive back to Meridian, their station wagon, known to law enforcement as a CORE vehicle, was stopped, and police arrested all three. They were never seen alive again.
On June 23 FBI investigators found the CORE station wagon, still smoldering from an attempt to destroy it. Throughout July, investigators combed the woods, fields, swamps, and rivers of Mississippi, they found the remains of eight African American men. Two were identified as Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered in May 1964. Another corpse was wearing a CORE t-shirt. Even less information was recorded about the five other bodies discovered.
Finally, on August 4, based on a tip from an informant, investigators went to an earthen dam on the Old Jolly Farm outside Philadelphia, MS. It was there that the FBI uncovered the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. These murders were the basis for the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
The violence of the Freedom Summer helped convince President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the non-white population had registered to vote, and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.
Voting Rights
Since its passage, the Voting Rights Act has been amended to include such features as the protection of voting rights for non-English speaking American citizens. It has also been walked back. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder decision, with a 5-4 vote that constraints placed on states and localities with a history of discrimination first obtain federal approval before changing voting rules — a process called “preclearance” was not needed any more. Following that ruling several states have enacted laws limiting voter access, including ID requirements, limits on early voting, mail-in voting and more.
On August 3, 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan addressed a large crowd at the Neshoba County Fair as he campaigned in his bid for the presidency. The fairgrounds are only a few miles away from the site where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered and buried 16 years earlier. Reagan appealed to the voters dreaming of a return to segregation by saying:
“I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
Reagan did not acknowledge the murders, which had been investigated by the FBI (because the state would not do so i.e., states' rights). Interesting enough these current Supreme Court Justices have ties to Reagan’s administration: John Roberts was Associate Counsel to the president, Clarence Thomas was Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights (Dept of Ed) and Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Sam Alito Assistant Solicitor General and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Neil Gorsuch clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan Supreme Court appointee)
Add in Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and you can see why many believe that there is a real threat to voting rights.
The Juneteenth Flag
There is a Juneteenth flag. The flag has a white star in the center. This has a dual meaning. First it represents Texas, the Lone Star State. Second, it represents the freedom of African Americans in all fifty states.
The bursting outline around the star represents a new beginning for the African Americans of Galveston and throughout the United States.
The curve that extends across the width of the flag represents a new horizon: the opportunities and promise that lay ahead for Black Americans.
The red, white, and blue represents the American flag, a reminder that the enslaved people and their descendants were and are Americans.
The Juneteenth flag reflects on the progress of Black people in America. The starburst at its center reminds all Americans that our hearts must remain full of the energy needed to create and sustain the rights of freedom and justice for all.